an vote, hold office, be tried
by a jury of her own peers--yea, and sit on the bench as justice
of the peace in the territory of Wyoming, may be reduced to a
political pariah in the State of New York. A woman who can vote
and hold office on the school board, and act as county
superintendent in Kansas and Minnesota, is denied these rights in
passing into Pennsylvania. A woman who can be a member of the
school board in Maine, Wisconsin, Iowa, and California, loses all
these privileges in New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. When
representatives from the territories are sent to congress by the
votes of women, it is time to have some national recognition of
this class of citizens.

This demand of national protection for national citizens is fated
to grow stronger every day. The government of the United States,
as the constitution is now interpreted, is powerless to give a
just equivalent for the supreme allegiance it claims. One sound
democratic principle fully recognized and carried to its logical
results in our government, declaring all citizens equal before
the law, would soon chase away the metaphysical mists and fogs
that cloud our political views in so many directions. When
congress is asked to put the name of God in the constitution, and
thereby pledge the nation to some theological faith in which some
United States citizens may not believe and thus subject a certain
class to political ostracism and social persecution, it is asked
not to protect but to oppress the citizens of the several States
in their most sacred rights--to think, reason, and decide all
questions of religion and conscience for themselves, without fear
or favor from the government. Popular sentiment and church
persecution is all that an advanced thinker in science and
religion should be called on to combat. The State should rather
throw its shield of protection around those uttering liberal,
progressive ideas; for the nation has the same interest in every
new thought as it has in the invention of new machinery to
lighten labor, in the discovery of wells of oil, or mines of
coal, copper, iron, silver or gold. As in the laboratory of
nature new forms of beauty are forever revealing themselves, so
in the world of thought a higher outlook gives a clearer vision
of the hei